NPR Music critic and correspondent Ann Powers (pictured right) moderates the 2014 Pop Conference keynote discussion, “You Gotta Move: Artists Talk About Life on the Road and Music in Motion.” Held in EMP’s Sky Church, the conversation featured (L to R) Mike McCready, one of the founding members of Pearl Jam; Alynda Lee Segarra, front woman of Hurray For The Riff Raff; bassist and prolific songwriter Meshell Ndegeocello; and soul singer Sharon Jones.

Photo courtesy EMP staff.

2014 EMP Pop Conference attendees fill the seats of EMP’s JBL Theater to experience one of the weekend’s over 35 sessions. The annual conference returned to Seattle in 2014 after three years roaming, with the conference taking place at UCLA (Los Angeles, CA) in 2011; NYU (New York, NY) in 2012; and five different venues in 2013, including EMP Museum, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum (Cleveland, OH); USC (Los Angeles, CA), Tulane University (New Orleans, LA), and NYU.

Photo courtesy EMP staff.

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The annual EMP Pop Conference, first held in 2002, mixes together ambitious music writing of every kind, in an attempt to bring academics, critics, musicians, and dedicated fans into a collective conversation.

Exploding conventions has long put the bomp in pop: the uncontainable desire of those deemed sexually unnatural, racial impostors, gender outlaws, obsessed fans, willful bohemians, or just plain weird. This year’s EMP Pop Conference offers more than 125 presentations exploring the subject of music and transgression. Subjects range from panels on heavy metal and the underground rock legend Lou Reed to a roundtable on hip-hop and R&B pioneer Missy Elliott, whose “Get Ur Freak On” gives us our title and a session of talks on Aggro Asian Pop.

The conference begins Thursday night, April 16, with a conversation about pop and transgression featuring many notables from journalism and academia, including Ann Powers, Carl Wilson, and Jody Rosen. A range of panels fill up Friday and Saturday and conclude Sunday morning, with topics that include: the recently departed Rod McKuen and Kim Fowley, “Joni Mitchell’s Pimp Game,” the erotics of Aretha Franklin (including a talk by her biographer, David Ritz), clowning Ella Fitzgerald and revisionist Billie Holiday, Jimmie Rodgers in Kenya, and a roundtable attempt to designate the worst song of all time. As always with the Pop Conference, the range of presenters is as important as the subject matter: critics for the likes of NPR, Slate, and Billboard in dialogue with academics and musicians.

For a full listing of presenters and panels, click on the links on this page.

Registration

Conference attendance is free, but space is limited, so those seeking to attend are strongly encouraged to register in advance. Information about hotels and other local arrangements can also be found on this page. Questions? Email PopConference@EMPmuseum.org.

2015 Conference Information

Thursday, 7:00pm–8:45pm

Keynote Panel: Can Pop Really Be Transgressive? Poptimism and Its Discontents

Since the EMP Pop Conference began in 2002, it’s been connected to “poptimism”: celebrating the stylistic and demographic diversity of best-selling industry fodder. This started as a playful reaction to “rockism” and similar emphases—in hip-hop, jazz, Americana, and other genres—on great artists, surging undergrounds, and rebel genres. Many academics, too, have made mainstream music an object of study.

But it’s time to challenge poptimism’s assumptions and limitations. What does a focus on commercially dominant hits imply toward musically innovative, socially transgressive, or politically provocative artists who are unlikely to achieve, and may not seek, mainstream success on the same scale—or toward the audiences and subcultures they serve? Has our increased awareness that “taste” is never universal or innocent inhibited the expression of dissenting critical judgments?

Topics will include:

Poptimism, the marketplace, and aesthetics: To what extent is poptimism a manufactured, sanctioned perspective, shaped by the collapsing/restructuring of the recording and publishing industries? How should criticism work against listicles and click fodder? Can poptimists attack settled taste without repeating rockism?

Poptimism, identity, and politics: Poptimism originated to make room for women and people of color within discourses that privileged white men. Does a focus on the mainstream exclude those whose identities challenge social norms? Are diverse voices central as writers within these debates? If embracing the personal as political illuminates different pop publics, what of activism, protest, and resistance?

Poptimism in the present and past: Today, embracing the shiny, supposedly superficial, and accessible doesn't feel so novel. If poptimism “won,” might our reclamation of people and sounds once easily dismissed—feminine and queer, nonwhite, European or Latin, young—confront pop's conservatism? What insights derive from recent books and articles examining pop’s long, complicated history?

Event Venue

Featuring

Friday, 11:15am-12:45pm

Work It: A Missy Elliott Roundtable

Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On” is the title of this year’s Pop Conference. So it seems particularly appropriate to deconstruct the MC-crooner-producer-songwriter’s two-decades-plus creative output. Elliott rose to mainstream visibility crafting an innovative fusion of hip-hop and soul that helped explode the musical and sonic vocabulary of 21st century pop. Stylizing her body as a canvas, she accompanied her music releases with glammed-out, envelope-pushing videos. Elliott crafted an alternative and transgressive vision of divadom that opened cultural space for successive cohorts of rebellious creatives like M.I.A., Nicki Minaj, and Azealia Banks.

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Featuring

Friday, 12:45pm-2:00pm, Break

Friday, 2:00pm-4:00pm

When They Did That

Franklin Bruno, “‘When You Did That to Me’: Recomposition as Transgression in Billie Holiday’s ‘My Foolish Things’” Jack Hamilton, “Reggae and Shout: Doing Over the Beatles in the Jamaican 1960s” Michaelangelo Matos, “Sleeping in Between the Two of Us: ‘When You Were Mine’” Ann Powers, “Britney Spears as Cyborg”

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Voicing Transgression

Ginger Dellenbaugh, “From Earth Angels to Electric Lucifer: Castrati, Little Joe Cook, and the Vocoder” John Rockwell, “From Farinelli to Anthony: The Seductive, Disturbing, Sexy, Androgynous Allure of the High Male Voice” Chris Estey, “Her Greatest ‘Hits’: The Top Songs of Dominatrixes While They Work” Tom Kipp, “From the Old Chisholm Trail to the Nearest Circle K and from Actionable Offenses to Metallic K.O.: Exploring ‘The Filthy Song’ in Recorded Music!”

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Featuring

Friday, 8:30pm (7:30pm doors)

Pop Conference Presents TacocaT, Chastity Belt, S, and Childbirth

EMP Pop Conference and Hardly Art present an evening of subversive Seattle music performed by some of the region’s most oppositional and talented bands. Inspired by this year’s Pop Conference theme, “Get Ur Freak On: Music, Weirdness, and Transgression,” this rousing night of music will bring out your inner revolutionary as a new generation of empowered musicians strap on their guitars, rock out, and decimate the status quo.

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Vortices

Kyle Barnett and Shawn VanCour, “Eat What You Hear: A Short History of the Gustasonic” Charles F. McGovern, “I Want a Lavender Cadillac: Excess, Transgression, and Labor in Black Popular Music, 1940-1970” RJ Smith, “‘Let the States Tremble/Let the Nation Weep’: The Word and Wichita”

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Featuring

Saturday, 10:45am-12:15pm

The Worst Song Roundtable

In the spirit of EMP’s 2015 theme of “perversity,” our panel plans to identify the Worst Song in the World. We will ask participants in the conference to send us their list of “Worst Songs.” Drawing from this corpus and our own contributions we’ll select a small sample of both consensus and limit cases, and prepare to defend and rebut criticisms of each song. We expect what begins as a tour of unlistenable, unsavory, unprecedentedly awful music will transform into a secret search for the wonderful and bizarre and obscure. The presentation will be in a modified debate format, with opportunities for audience participation.

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Featuring

Saturday, 12:15pm-1:30pm, Break

Saturday, 12:30pm-1:00pm

Damon & Naomi Perform Fortune

Fortune exists as both a film and an album. Naomi Yang refers to the work as “a silent movie,” though the visuals are so bound up in the music (and vice versa) that it’s more of a long-form music video, a visual poem set to the metronome of a textural score. It is an expressive portrait, but doesn't adhere to any obvious narrative; rather, it's a comfortable space that the viewer can move in and out of, dreamlike and immersive. The 11 new songs on this LP or CD don’t require visual accompaniment—Damon & Naomi (of Galaxie 500) have constructed the sequence to communicate through sound alone—and for this performance, the duo will be presenting them live as a soundtrack to Naomi Yang's “silent” film.

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Difference and Belonging in Southern Music

David Cantwell, “Just Like Real People: Rock ‘n’ Roll, Country Music, and the Freedom to Be Like Everybody Else” Zandria Robinson, “Beyond Dirty: Rap Others in the Grotesque South” Charles Hughes, "‘It's Just Different Down Here’: Southern Landscapes and the Othering of Southern Music”

Event Venue

Learning Labs

Featuring

Critical Transgressions Roundtable

This informal roundtable discussion will present weird or transgressive critical practices, ways of reading musical texts that self-consciously break with convention. We will collectively discuss a diverse and eccentric array of phenomena—lawn ornaments, “Thriller,” Joni Mitchell’s pimp alter ego, embodied spectatorship—in an effort to decenter critical tropes such as reparative reading, muted critical bodies, music-specific claims, and our own published arguments. Our aim is to unsettle standard methodologies, our own included, and thus to offer new ways of “doing what we’re doing,” to steal and simplify a phrase from Charles Wright’s “Express Yourself.”

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Jesus Freaks Roundtable

Pop’s unholy marriage of art with commerce often sires music that’s bizarre enough, but when musicians add Jesus to the union, things can start getting really weird. How did the semi popular underground CCM of the ‘70s and ‘80s get swept away by today’s mega popular Praise and Worship music? How did the electric guitar evangelism coming from Southern black churches in the ‘60s influence both the Jesus Freaks and maverick Southern pop/rock artists? And how do the requirements for achieving weirdness change in all these different contexts?

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Sunday, 10:45am-12:45pm

Mainstream Mutations

Chris Molanphy, “UnLennon–UnMcCartney: Considering the Only Three Beatle Compositions to Hit No. 1 Without Lennon or McCartney” Stephen Thomas Erlewine, “Clones (We’re All): Paul McCartney and His Temporary Secretary Looking for Clues in the Fallout of Punk, Disco, and New Wave” Keith Harris, “The Mall Gaze: Tiffany’s ‘I Saw Him Standing There’ Looks Back at the Beatles” Maura Johnston, “The Buttons and the Pins and the Loud Fanfares: The Adoption of 'Beatles-esque' Elements by Late-80s Pop Outfits”

Event Venue

JBL Theater

Featuring

Getting Under the Covers with Japanese Pop

Michael Bourdaghs, “The Strangeness of the Peanuts: Cosmopolitanism and Geopolitics in Mainstream 1960s Japanese Pop” Jon Holt, “Transcending Japan’s Gender and Cultural Boundaries with Night-Cherry O-Shichi” John Whittier Treat, “Kasagi Shizuko and the Afro-Creolization of Postwar Japan” Nobuko Yamasaki, “Weird Reproductions of the Japanese Empire by Racialized Other Pop Stars”